TidyBlog

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Category Archives: Google

Hello tidy blog reader, I trust you are keeping well? Just a quick post that features a short graphic design agency video we put together, it featuring some of Mike’s art and illustration work…

There has been lots going on at Tidy Design in recent months; Rosie has moved on to pastures new, Luke has been smashing multiple web development tasks and new projects, Emma has joined our team and is putting new processes in place, and Mike has been dabbling with video production, some in-house marketing campaigns and business development!

With all this going on, we still found time for a cheeky pizza (and beer) in Port Solent, raising our glasses to chapters new, good health, friendship and all things tidy!

Graphic designers Portsmouth

If you are looking for a graphic designer or a graphic design agency based in Portsmouth, Hampshire then please contact Tidy Design today, our team would be delighted to help!

A breadcrumb trail is an indication of hierarchy, the position and importance of a web page within your website. Google will use a breadcrumb markup in the body of a web page to help it digest this information (site structure and pages of relevance).

Below is an example of some structured data I created for TidyDesign.com, code based on Google’s JSON-LD markup and covering a few key web pages on our site;

Your structured data (breadcrumbs) should be a true representation of page content. By adding structured data to your website, you can enable more of your site’s functional and visual content to appear directly in Googles search results. This is a win win, it may give your site an edge over its competition plus help boost your organic search results.

If you would like to discuss Structured Data and implementing this on your own website then please contact Tidy Design today, we’d be happy to help.

A secure web is hear to stay; in July 2018 Google’s Chrome browser will mark non-HTTPS sites as ‘not secure’ … Is your website ready? Will this impact your business?

The short story; Google will soon identify insecure sites in its Chrome browser, another move to make the web a more secure place. This update will coincide with Google’s release of Chrome 68. We know Google has been pushing us towards HTTPS for many years now. If your website does not already offer its users a green shiny padlock, the chances are your organic search results have been impacted. The future is not orange, its green!

Here at Tidy Design we appreciate that a migration from HTTP to HTTPS can be quite an undertaking. The process (and cost) will all depend on your website (its age, the framework, its structure, the quality of code, number of pages, what it offers etc)… If you need any support with SSL compliance / auditing then we’d be happy to help.

Google Rich Cards are a search result format that builds on the success of rich snippets. Google Rich Cards use schema.org, a structured markup to display content (similar to rich snippets), giving users a more visual search result. From what I have read, this is targeted more towards mobile users.

For website owners / developers this is yet another new way to stand out from the crowd in Google’s SERPs, but at this early stage coverage will depend on your sector and content. As Tidy Design is looking to recruit and grow as a company in 2018, I have been experimenting below with a job advert – this code was added to a script type=”application/ld+json” tag;

Google just announced that they’re beginning to implement a full-scale roll out of their “mobile-first indexing” protocol, after a long period of testing and experimentation with limited roll-outs.

By this, Google means that its system of crawlers that help the search engine discover and “index” (collect into a searchable list) websites will attempt to do so using the mobile-friendly version of a site first rather than the historically-used desktop version. Put simply – on the current desktop-first indexing system, Google will look at your site from a desktop perspective first and determine its ranking signals from what it finds, proving subsequent boosts for sites with mobile-friendly views. On the new system, Google will look at your site from a mobile perspective first and determine its ranking signals from what it finds. It will fall back to a site’s desktop view if no mobile-friendly view exists or in certain other scenarios.

Overall, this shift shouldn’t impact rankings much (in theory) – but it is a fundamental shift in how Google thinks about web content. To put it in perspective, Google is effectively now approaching the web as a mobile utility over a desktop utility. This is a natural progression given that since 2015, the majority of Google’s traffic and searches have come from mobile users. Google has advocated good mobile-friendly design for years by teaching and by ranking boosts.

This change will roll out in waves, with webmasters receiving notifications via Google Search Console when their property has made the switch.

So what should you do if you are switched to this new system? The answer, right now, is not to panic. As stated above – not much should change. Of course if your site isn’t responsive(adapts well to different screen sizes) or if you don’t have a dedicated mobile version, then your non-mobile-friendly desktop content will no longer rank quite as well and you may want to take some action to update the site in preparation. Thankfully, mobile-first and mobile-friendly design has been in the web developer’s consciousness for years, and Google has increasingly encouraged a mobile-friendly web – so this isn’t coming out of nowhere, and the majority of modern sites already meet the requirements for at least basic mobile friendliness.

So for the most part, everything should be fine. For webmasters and web developers, going forward an increased focus on responsive design (a good approach so as to ensure that mobile content and desktop content don’t differ in a significant way) and mobile-first optimisation (load times, page speed, navigation, readability, etc) will be important. Overall, this is just a natural step forward for Google and the web, and a long-term boon for the increasing number of mobile web users.

As a start in a 2017 effort to update and revamp TidyDesign.com, we have upgraded to HTTPS, the security-concerned friend of HTTP.

HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol, and it denotes the set of rules computers use while communicating in HyperText (web pages) over the web. That HTTP’s rules underpin the web can be seen in the typical URL – “http://website.com”. The prefix to that address denotes the protocol in use.

You may have noticed that more and more sites over the past decade are labelled with a different prefix – “https://website.com”. This denotes that the site is accessed over HTTPS; or HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure. HTTPS adds security concerns to HTTP’s base ruleset, ensuring that all transferred data is encrypted, undamaged and travelling to an authenticated recipient (in other words, HTTPS helps ensure that you are actually browsing Amazon.com, not someone pretending to be Amazon).

For the modern web, HTTPS is important. There’s no way around it. HTTP doesn’t concern itself much with secure communication, because the original purpose of the web was just to share textual information. The modern web, by which we trade personal details millions of times a second, requires a more secure underlying ruleset. When you’re sending someone your credit card details to make a purchase, you’re going to want that to be encrypted – it’s as simple as that.

There are reasons other than adapting to industry standards to upgrade to HTTPS, from SEO to simple consumer reassurance. Google ranks secure sites higher than insecure sites by default, so upgrading is a good first-step for getting to page one. Consumers are becoming more aware of security concerns on the web, too – largely thanks to that green padlock you see next to secure web addresses in the browser – and are less likely to provide any details over an insecure connection. The sound theory is that if you provide a secure connection, your customer is much more likely to contribute to your business with confidence.

Implementation of HTTPS for a domain involves purchasing a certificate from a Certificate Authority, and some server configuration. Those certificates verify domains as being owned by the people who claim to own them, facilitating the green padlock your users will see. Here at Tidy, we’re happy to provide this service and set up secure connections, moving the web forward and growing your business – just give us a call, or send us an email.

HTML documents are not all about text and content. While the bulk of an HTML document will denote the content seen on a webpage and how that content is displayed, some of the most key facets of these documents are not shown to the user in the conventional way – instead, these elements are shown to search engines and browsers.

Two of the most important of these “hidden” elements are the <title> and <meta> tags. Both serve to improve the general usability of search engines, and attract new traffic by way of advertising a page and its content more accurately.

<title> tags – you guessed it – define the title of a page. This will be used both by the browser (to name the tab and window), and by the search engine (to name the Search Engine Results Page entry for the page). This is your user’s first contact point with your site and should be unique and descriptive to avoid being lost in the crowd.

A great example of a unique title tag could be:

<meta> tags are a little more complex. They are designed to contain “information about the information” – character encodings, geographic locations, authors and many more fields can be defined with a meta tag. One of the most important pieces of meta information is a “meta description” which should be a short (150-160) character description of the page.

This description will appear as a snippet underneath the page’s title on the Result Page, and serves to bring more traffic to the page from users who will actually benefit from visiting your page.

A typical meta description for the About page defined above might take the following form:

Note that if a page lacks a meta description, the search engine will usually take the first content on the page for this field – this is almost never ideal, and can detract from the professional look, feel and usability of the site – usability starts at the Results Page, not at your actual site!

When marketing a site online you need to remember the importance of a good first impression. Most landing pages will consist of a pretty photo, heading, sub-heading, the must-know information about a service or product followed by the nice-to-know stuff…

The target audience of your landing page is the first thing you will need to identify and understand; this will determine how copy is displayed. Should you compress data (keep it simple) or be really informative.

Whilst on the topic of copy, try to avoid multiple CTA’s (Call To Actions) on a page. If time/energy is focused on one goal you are more likely to convert. What goal is most important to you – Are you looking for online enquires, sales, customer data, new members, increased brand awareness etc…

A good first impression is very important, below is a page we recently created for a client and his PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign. It takes into account the points mentioned above, offering basic information on a service they offer with a clear call to action.

Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions, the team at Tidy Design would be delighted to discuss and assist in any brand development work you may have. Thank you for reading.

Sadly Google Penguin can’t identify every bad link or bad site on the web, big “G” is however rolling out more updates to tackle this. Google’s ability to detect spam and link manipulation is only going to get better so box clever! When it comes to SEO and backlinks Google has a dream, to wipe out any manipulative linking practices. Quality links are key, they are harder to obtain, and they are the way forward.

I have listed a few links below you may find interesting, these covering the topic of backlinks, Penguin and link building:

So what about link building in 2015, what kind of links should we all be looking for? Well, Google wants to see genuine links, relevant links, links that add value to the web and its users. Think an original source of content or resource, further information, people or business. You should create something of value and then get people to link or talk about it – Post comments on multiple blogs / forums / social sites referencing this content you created.

The days of link manipulation have long gone; there is no quick fix. Link building is now about marketing your business online correctly, building links for people and not web crawlers.

I hope the above info on link building has helped; please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions, we’d be happy to help. Thank you for reading, your comments / feedback on this article would be much appreciated…

There are many ways to start developing a new website; you could start writing the code, create a couple of mock-ups in Photoshop, map out page layouts on a whiteboard or in a notepad…

Information architecture (IA) is an important part of web design however it can often get overlooked. This could be the result of a small development budget or an “ASAP” deadline. How developers allocate their time will certainly impact the overall cost and ETA of a project.

A lot of thought/planning should go into a new website, be it a single page site or full-blown web application – Structural design and information is very important. If you require assistance mapping out a website then please visit our Web Design Process page. Good luck and thanks for visiting…